The Listings; VICKY SHICK

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Published: March 18, 2005

Ms. Shick belongs to a school of female choreographers -- among them Susan Rethorst and Wendy Perron -- who specialize in implied scenarios, unknowable and mysterious yet strangely clear. Ms. Shick's quiet authority encourages trust as she draws the viewer through dark thickets of possibilities into the still center -- the knowable heart -- of each new dance. A dancer bursts out extravagantly but is interrupted and exposed as vulnerable in Ms. Shick's latest piece, ''Repair,'' set to a score by Elise Kermani, a sound designer, that is triggered by sound-producing light sensors on the costumes. Reassuringly, those costumes and the sculptural set are the work of Barbara Kilpatrick, a longtime collaborator whose delicately powerful designs create the perfect worlds for Ms. Shick's intimate, poetic distillations of time and place. ''Repair'' features Ms. Shick and Jodi Melnick (above), another frequent collaborator. Tall, slender and supple, with a wide-cheekboned face ringed by a fluff of hair, Ms. Shick looks like a cross between an angel and one of Walker Evans's paradoxically beautiful Dust Bowl farm wives. She is one of many choreographers active today who cut their dance-teeth with Trisha Brown. She has also danced with Ms. Rethorst and Ms. Perron. Vicky Shick's ''Repair'' will be presented tonight and tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Sunday's performance will be followed by an informal conversation with the artists. (Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, at Second Avenue, East Village, (212)674-8194 or www.danspaceproject.org. Tickets: $15; TDF vouchers accepted.) JENNIFER DUNNING